King in Splendour

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Having established himself on Mycenae's throne, matching ruthless-ness with greater ruthlessness, Agamemnon accepts in all their gravity the burdens of a kingdom. His grand design is the unification of Achaea in preparation for a full campaign against the city state of Troy, long responsible for the interruption of shipments of grain westwards from the Crimea - with drastic economic consequences for Achaea. With the possible exception of Herodotus, it is likely that few before Shipway have put forward the idea that the Trojan War was about food and not about women. This novel bristles indeed with original ideas - many of them unorthodox and entertaining - about what actually happened three thousand years ago in Greece. Homer, whose writing has hitherto conditioned our understanding of events, is shown to be attached as PR man to a treacherous Achilles; Iphigeneia is mentally retarded and her sacrifice is Agamemnon's brainwave- a means of getting at Clytemnaistra, his wife and the girl's adoptive mother, who has recently poisoned her husband's mistress. Again, it is difficult to coax Heroes into a fighting mood merely over food and economics - they need a romantic ideal as motivation, so Agamemnon himself arranges for the elopement of Paris and Helen to Troy. The narrative sweep of this story is irresistible and the details which the author gives of the way of life, women, armour, the Theban vice and other sexual exertions, are constantly arresting and fascinating. George Shipway's gift in making history live again has never been better deployed than in the present book, following the previous and quite separate novel about Agamemnon's youth, Warrior in Bronze.